Vol 4 - Special issue

Art and Science

List of Articles

Le thème du paysage ne s’oppose pas, et même invite aux échappées surréalistes. En voici une comme entrée en matière. Par suite d’une peu croyable coïncidence de dates, et aussi de la parenté des thèmes, j’avais depuis des mois confondu deux colloques dans mon agenda : l’un organisé à Paris du 23 au 24 mai 2019 sous le titre « Le regard écologique », l’autre à Toulouse du 22 au 24 mai sous le titre « Approches écosystémiques et sensibles du paysage : des sciences de la nature aux arts du paysage ». Programmé dans les deux colloques, mais ne pouvant me dédoubler, j’avais dû in extremis me résoudre à choisir le premier, auquel je m’étais engagé d’abord. Quant au second, je remercie Anaïs Belchun de me donner la chance de me rattraper avec cette petite préface, en effectuant la boucle que voici :

Les articles regroupés dans ce numéro thématique mettent en relation deux thèmes majeurs de la pensée contemporaine : le paysage et l’écologie, en croisant démarches théoriques et pratiques, selon une approche interdisciplinaire.

From Colline to L’Iris de Suse and the short story L’Homme qui plantait des arbres, nature and landscape have a predominant position in Jean Giono’s work. If some of the critics (and readers) could see a "wonderful lesson of environmentalism", to use the terms of Dominique le Brun, others are more cautious like Jacques Chabot or Walter Wagner. Because if we can assimilate panic thinking, the "round of the world", so dear to Giono, to the morinian concept of "reliance", the lack of environmentalist commitment in the political sphere is clear. Thus, can we talk about a literary environmentalism in Jean Giono’s work and if so, according to which modalities?

Using on a detailled study in terminology about the word - landscape - we must define the limits of our contemporary definition of landscape. Then we must consider the common features of ecological art, in order to compose the expected word. We have to select, classify and synthesize the required signifier.

Ecology studies the relationships between living beings and their environment. A cultural approach of ecological issues questions the sensitive and significant relationships that we humans establish with our living environments. Landscape allows us to approach these issues in a sensitive way. The very notion of landscape is challenged by the ecological approach. However, I propose to reconsider the value of a landscape approach (provided that the meaning of this concept is broadened), by identifying different landscape models, and by questioning them in terms of ecology. This proposal is based on a distinction between green fiction and ecopoetics. Green fiction is made of representations from a superficial approach of ecology : the scenery-landscape, the emotion-landscape, the spectacle-landscape and the disaster-landscape. Ways to ecopoetics express a deeper approach, through the models of the system-landscape, the cosmos-landscape, the living-landscape and the living environment-landscape. A critical journey through these different landscape models will allow us to grasp the ecological challenges of landscape, which reflects our vision of the world and our ways of interact with our common environment : the Earth.

Farming practices shape landscape. Farmers experience it in their everyday routine (Henry, 2012) and landscape is related to the living (“habiter”, Besse, 2009). Modern agroforestry which means land-use systems where woody perennials are deliberately integrated with crops and/or animals on the same parcel is encouraged for ecological reasons. How do farmers deal with it? Our study shows that agroforestry also could be chosen for benefitting the living environment or to communicate with the neighborhood (Rue, 2018). Agroforestry is an effective method of involving them in a design process on their territory. We have analyzed the adoption of Agroforestry by looking at designs, diversity with regard to farmers’ life course trajectory and its impacts at the Landscape scale. The aesthetic and affective (biographic) aspects of these projects need to be considered more and related to ecological values.

Initially based on observation, ecology has gradually become a discipline attached to standards, microscopes and abstract virtual models that are far from the reality. When it comes to the study of landscapes, ecology struggles to formalize its field of knowledge in order to acquire a real operational dimension. Yet it has its full place in schools training landscape designers whose practices consist in imagining a new spatial environment, by integrating data from nature combined with those produced by societies. Ecology also participates in the renewal of landscape representation methods by proposing new approaches adapted to the landscape project. It is through discussion and reasoning that representations participate in the construction of a complex landscape thinking and knowledge that is enriched by action.

The actual management of shrubbery induces significant costs for their maintenance. Pruning practices are not always appropriate and exert a strong pressure on the plant. They are the legacy of ancient customs. To better understand the relationship between man and plant, it is necessary to develop an adapted approach. We have tried to develop a study methodology based on areas from forestry research, business management and geography sciences. The main objective is to reveal and / or identify the link between man and the plant, their own nature and their reciprocal influences in order to reduce the human pressure on the plant and consequently on the natural environment. Garden is considered a geographical interface. The plant is analyzed from the angle of the architectural landscape approach. Landscape professionals by the process approach.

Gianni Burattoni participated, as an artist specialist of garden and landscape, in a large-scale landscape rehabilitation project in the Goitsche region of Germany. The idea was to convert this former industrial region into a “cultural landscape”, combining cultural, ecological and aesthetic issues. This article presents the artistic choices that guided the development of the «Green Square», including artistic installations designed by the author. These choices were based on the recognition of the perpetual transformations of landscapes, beyond the distinctions between natural evolution and human activity. They take into account the industrial history of the places, as well as their current ecological characteristics, to propose a new way of living them.

Song simultaneously activates body functions, emotional centers and the intellect. All three participate in the exchange that the singer initiates with his or her environment. In the mountains, for the communities who live there, this environment is a major source of sustenance for the physical body, of experiences for generating emotional response, and of inspiration for the intellect. Song is an ode, a conversation, but also a negociation with Nature, and the natural environment can be generous or miserly, benevolent or threatening. Through examples taken from research in both the French Pyrenees and the Argentinian Andes, this essay will allow us to discover how the functions and effects of ancestral song forge, maintain and care for complex, essential relationships with the natural environment, and how the environmental perspectives that these relationships open resonate with contemporary thinking on ecology as it is practiced by researchers such as Arne Naess, Isabelle Stengers, Donna Haraway or Brian Massumi. A relation to place that which is a deep commitment that merges emotion and politics, body and space.

Relying on Timothy Morton’s concepts of “mesh” and “strange strangers”, this article aims to question the aesthetic means of cinema when it strives to figure and represent ecological phenomena which landscape arts based on the classical pictorial model fail to fashion into a relevant image. This study of Leviathan (Castaing-Taylor & Paravel, 2012) questions the paradox of wanting to think ecology, consciousness (and experience) of milieu, and the persitence of the landscape scheme together.

Through an art-science installation based on the perception of plants, particularly in terms of sound, we will examine our relationship with living organisms. The question of the impossibility of understanding the alterity of the perceptual worlds of each organism is one of the axes that is articulated in this article around, the poles of knowledge production that are science and the arts. The vegetable world invites us to review our usual categories of mind such as memory, individuality, time, identity, separability.

In this article we are going to present an artistic process within a landscape perspective, which scopes with a complex an ecosystemic approach. Our art project named Luminale was made while exploring a multiplicity of environment. Within this artwork, we want to update the symbolic of the “cabin” to question our relationships to the environment and technologies. With reference to philosophers who advocate a modest and poetic vision of the habitat (Thoreau, Bachelard), we first study how the symbolic of the “cabin” allows us to question the habitat and technologies in a nomadic way. Secondly, this article focuses more on the wilderness dimension existing in Luminale art installation. Invoking the work of theorists who have addressed questions of interactive devices (Couchot), plastic space (Guerin) and in particular the notion of “figural” (Deleuze), we will demonstrate furthermore how Luminale’s interactive scenography immerses spectators in a unique artistic ecosystem. The work’s experience allows us to revisit the visual and sound landscapes from which it was composed, inviting us to slow down and take the time to observe and listen to the environment around us.

This paper opens a reflection on the stakes of the encounter between art and anthropology and jointly on the relations between fiction and documentary. Reflection is initiated in a concrete experience from elsewhere that invites us to rethink the limits of the construction of worlds, such as those of disciplines. Two works studied problematize this meeting: La mangeuse de pierres (2019) by Célia Riboulet and Juegos de Herencia (2011) by Clemencia Echeverri.

My approach to the landscape, as an olfactory designer, questions the relationship of humans with their environment: ecology. From the Montalbanez project: olfactory landscape(s) of Montauban, we focus on some notions around ecology. In our remarks, the global and fuzzy notion of "ecology" follows a period that can be described as "proto-ecology" where we have mainly focused on health issues. The chemical and communicative sense of smell is ecologist by weaving invisible links between people and the environment. Olfactory ecology: a "bioculture", a living culture of the living allows to translate the invisible world into a perceptible world by giving it shape. This first olfactory form of Montauban seems to be a dominant "green note". This scent produced by chlorophyllous vegetation seems to invade the Montalban olfactory landscape also called "city-countryside".

The workshop, the artist’s intimate space, reflects a poetic creation journey. It’s a place conducive to research, to sensitive experimentation in order to develop a singular plastic practice. I perceive the workshop as an ecosystem where an interaction is created between a being (the plastic designer), a phenomenon (the creation) and an object of study (the pattern of the forest in the children’s books). Through the study of the forest, which has a particular importance in the tale ; since it’s the place where many adventures from the narrative scheme take place and the design of pedagogical and artistic workshops around ecology in primary school ; I want to reflect the thought process (interpretation) and invention (illustration) of a graphic and plastic landscape (coloring).